Personal Development Planning for Self Improvement

Personal Development Planning for Self Improvement is the way to actively welcome in a new life – a new way of living. It’s an awesome personal development and self-improvement tool.

A Personal Development Plan (PDP) is an important process designed to engage your thinking and doing towards your own success. Throughout your career, studies, as a parent or even just for personality development it’s important to reflect on your progress, achivements and areas you wish to improve on.

Engaging with a PDP helps you to keep a record of the skills and abilities you’re developing and realise how they are transferable to other contexts.

Personal Development Planning is an adventure into a new life because it broadens your mind to new ideas and possibilities. Once you’re in the swing of using regular PDPs you’ll start to notice that as you develop new skills new doors open up. For instance, if you’ve chosen to develop your communicate skills as part of your PDP and then in a few months time your communication skills have improved your boss or co-workers might allocate you to do the presentations at work – which enhances your profile with other companies. Or, if you choose to develop a deeper relationship with your children you might notice how this improves your overall daily routine reducing stress levels and increasing feelings of happiness and satisfaction in the home.

Of course, a PDP can be quite complex listing all the area of you and your life that you wish to change in fine detail including all the skills you wish to develop in your career and the minute details of the steps you need to take to progress towards these self-improvement areas.

OR a PDP can be more simplified choosing one area to work on at a time. Everyone’s mind works differently so if you’re a details kind of person then perhaps a more complex plan is your style. My personal style is to put an idea in my mind of what I’d like to change and then start working towards that progressively.

First choose a topic you want to improve. That could be anything you want to change in yourself and/or in your life. Write it down.

Next, write down the complexities of that topic. I suggest brainstorming the following areas:

How does your environment affect you – in relation to the topic?

How does your family affect you – in relation to the topic?

How does your job affect you – in relation to the topic?

How does money affect you – in relation to the topic of change?

What beliefs do you currently hold about that topic of change?

What emotions are you feeling about that topic of change?

Take time to explore the questions and write down your answers in as much detail as you can. And then put the piece of paper/notebook down for a few days.

THEN, in a few days time read what you wrote down and then write down MORE that comes to mind.

Once you feel that you’ve explored the topic in detail choose 5 different ways in which you can make changes to it.